Two long months had passed since my arrival in Quebec. I was heartily tired of its noisy, brawling life, hungry for the solitude of my native wilderness. At first I had found much to see and enjoy, but the novelty soon wore off. I had but few acquaintances in the town, and none of them were to my fancy. I preferred the seclusion of the hotel, and the company of the honest little Frenchman and his wife. Not so with Baptiste. He had fallen in with a loose set of his own kind, and frequented the low taverns by the riverside. That very evening I had brought him home helplessly drunk, and seen him safely abed.
But before I go on, if you please, a word or two concerning the business that brought me to Quebec. I have spoken of Griffith Hawke, the factor of Fort Royal. He was a man of fifty-odd years, simple-hearted, absorbed in his duties, and with not a spark of romance or sentiment in his being. Would you believe that such a one could think of marriage? Yet it was even so! A wife he suddenly resolved to have, and he sent for one to the head office in London, as was a common custom in those days. Many a woman was sent out by the company to cheer the lonely lot of their employees.
To be brief, a correspondence was carried on for two years between Fort Royal and London—that meant but a couple of letters on either side—and the result of it was that I was now in Quebec to meet the bride of Griffith Hawke and escort her to her distant home.
She was due in the early summer, being a passenger on the ship Good Hope. I was to put her in care of Madame Ragoul, and we were both to sail for Hudson’s Bay at the first opportunity in one of the company’s vessels. The factor had not been able to leave his post for so long a time, and he had sent me on this errand with evident reluctance. He would meet us at Fort York, where there was a priest to perform the marriage ceremony.
As I said before, the task was not to my liking. Love was a word without meaning to me. I knew nothing of women, and had reached the age of twenty-five without giving a thought to the other sex. I was completely ignorant of the purport of the letters that had passed between Griffith Hawke and the head office, and as I never questioned him about particulars, he never vouchsafed me any. I naturally expected to meet a middle-aged dame who would make a suitable partner for the prosaic factor, and would adapt herself to the crude life and customs of the lonely trading post.
A mission of adventure and deadly peril would have been more to my taste, but this strange enterprise was put upon me in the capacity of a company’s servant, and I was resolved to carry out my instructions to the best of my ability. I was pondering the matter as I sat in the hotel that June night, and reflecting, with some relief, that I should not be much longer detained in Quebec, for the Good Hope was expected in port at any day or hour.
Having finished my third pipe, I knocked the ashes out gently so as not to disturb my still sleeping companion. I rose to my feet, stifling a yawn, and just then a man entered the room from the bar, closing the door behind him. While he stood hesitating, I took in his appearance by a brief glance. He was tall, slim and wiry, with tawny yellow hair worn long, and thick, drooping mustache. His eyes were of a cold steel-blue, and his face, though very handsome, had something sinister and fierce about it. From his attire I judged him at once to be a polished man of the world, who had seen other lands than the Canadas. He wore a lace-trimmed coat of buff, breeches of the same material, top boots of tanned buckskin, and abroad felt hat of a claret color. For the rest, a sword dangled at his side, and a brace of pistols peeped from his belt. He looked about fifty, and by his flushed countenance I saw that he was more or less under the influence of liquor.
I noticed all this even before the man drew closer. Then seeing me clearly in the light shed from the candles, he gave a sudden start. The color left his cheeks, and he stared at me with an unmistakable expression of bewildered surprise, of something like sharp fear and guilt. I never doubted that he mistook me for another person.
“Have we met before, sir?” I asked courteously.
The stranger laughed, and his agitation was gone.